Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

India may have the best of modern technology and a powerful economy, but it is deeply religious.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.

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Rudyard Kipling, best-known of all the chroniclers of Empire, wrote when India was still the largest jewel in the British crown, “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” Having read this fascinating book I am inclined to agree with him. William Dalrymple, a modern-day writer and observer of India, who lives outside Delhi, sets out to discover just what makes the sub-continent still so different from the West – or, more accurately, the “Anglosphere”. In this task he makes no judgments and comes to no conclusions; he simply allows selected Indian voices speak for themselves.

From a Western perspective India is the country which is soon to overtake Japan as the third largest economy in the world. Yet only 20 minutes’ distance from the Microsoft Indian headquarters cars have largely given way to camels and bullocks, the immemorial form of transport. This discrepancy was further highlighted for the author when he happened to meet up with a sanyasi (wanderer). To his surprise he found that this man had an MBA and a high-flying career in marketing, yet chose to give it all up to become a wandering, naked sadhu. He told Dalrymple he could not face selling fridges any more so “I gave away my belongings to the poor... threw away my suit, rubbed ash on my body and found a monastery.”

Wondering how common such a dramatic gesture might be, Dalrymple went in search of nine different people who had either turned their backs on ordinary life, like the sadhu referred to, or who had stayed loyal to an ancient familial or tribal tradition of semi-mystical entertainment. Among them are a Jain nun, a dancer, a temple prostitute, a hereditary singer of epics, a blind minstrel and a craftsman of idols to be used for worship. Some, such as the dancer or the temple prostitute, are from the poor, dalit (untouchable) caste so that it could be argued that their calling gives them a social status they would not otherwise have. This is not a sufficient answer. It would be more accurate to say that they followed a family profession into a world they regard as at least half-divine and which they believe gives a transcendental dimension to their lives.

Others, such as the Jain nun who chose to leave her loving family aged 14, have come from a wealthy background, making their sacrifice appear the more extraordinary. The Jain way of life is unbelievably ascetic to Western eyes: homeless, forbidden to wash or beg for food and only possessing a small water pot and peacock fan (to sweep the path before them so as not to inadvertently kill a living insect). Yet Mataji, the nun questioned by the author, has no regrets, regarding her life as the way to free her soul from earthly ties. She describes the ultimate Jain practice of fasting until death, sallekhana, as a slow and joyful way to abandon the body. Whatever one might think of it, it clearly has nothing to do with anorexia or a protest hunger fast.

The dancer, Hari Das, comes from a long line of theyyam dancers in Kannur. For nine months of the year he works as a labourer and prison guard; for three months he believes he is possessed by the god Vishnu while he dances. Dalrymple adds, “The calm, slightly earnest and thoughtful man I knew... was changed into a frenzied divine athlete.” He is not the only character interviewed who is certain that during ritual occasions he is transformed into a vehicle of the gods. Mohan, a hereditary singer of the Rajasthan medieval Epic of Pabuji, 4,000 lines long and 600 years old, asks “How can I perform unless the spirit comes?” He is illiterate, and tells Dalrymple that it is this that gives him his phenomenal memory; when the singers become literate so as to be able to read their lines, they start to forget them.

One of the saddest interviewees is the temple prostitute, Rani Bai, dedicated to the goddess Yellamma as a child and then at puberty, effectively sold by her poverty-stricken parents into temple sex slavery. She is quick to make a distinction between her life and that of ordinary prostitutes, but the difference seems minimal; if she doesn’t work she will starve and already, like many of her kind, she is HIV-positive.

Criss-crossing the sub-continent, Dalrymple visits a Tibetan monk at Dharamsala on the Tibetan border, where the Dalai Lama now lives. This man, aged 74, who fled from the Chinese along with the Dalai Lama in 1959, admits that “It is not easy to reach the stage where you really remove the world from your heart”. Later, down in Tamil Nadu, the author meets a maker of idols from an ancient lineage of craftsmen, who believes that if he follows the prescribed methods with care and reverence, the god or goddess will enter the finished object. His son, to his obvious distress, wants to break with this tradition and study computer engineering.

Dalrymple is a sympathetic listener, self-effacing and uncritical. His aim has been to present the other side of India, the side alien to a Western secular consciousness (and to millions of urban, educated Indians as well.) It is true that the rites he observes usually survive in rural or remote areas, deeply conservative parts of the country where ‘progress’ has not yet brought its mixed, implacable benefits. Yet behind all the strange, mystical and inexplicable phenomena is a hunger for the world of the spirit and recognition that the material world is not the whole of life. Some in the West might mock these interviewees and dismiss them as simple, uneducated and superstitious. Yet all of them, literate or not, come across as eloquent about the purpose of their lives and conveying an aura of quiet, reflective dignity. India remains the East – but for how long?

Francis Phillips writes from Buckinghamshire, in the UK.

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